I saw this film at the FCP SuperMeet and was blown away. It’s been made by a young American Director called Seth Worley and features his younger brother. The short was funded by Red Giant who produce the best plug ins for Final Cut Pro. I personally can’t imagine working without Magic Bullet Looks and after the event am extremely excited about getting my hands on Magic Bullet Mojo.
They storyline for this simple film is exquisitely simple. A young film-maker purchases a ‘Plot-device’ from Amazon. Everytime he presses it we find ourselves in a different type of film.
The overall feel was something like ‘last Action Hero’ meets ‘Back to the Future’. It’s great rushing from sci-fi, to zombie to romance and the genres are perfectly spoofed. Some great camera work and direction there.
My favourite is the Die Hard esque police fight with the black cop. Spot on.
I love when someone takes a technique, plays with it, twists it or just adds an extra sprinkle of creative spice. That is precisely what J W Griffiths did to win the Nokia Shorts competition for 2011.
This film was shot entirely on a Nokia N8 in Paris, London and New York.
This is quite simply one of the most delightful shorts I have seen this year. Beautiful cinematography combined with the timeless car-journey classic game of word association is played out with intricate attention to detail. The film comes from Everynone, a production company based in New York.
A couple of moments in the film stood out for me. The shot of the piano dropping from a large building for instance. I’d love to know how they created this shot. My gut feeling is that they used miniatures. If they did it’s fantastically clever, incredibly executed and a stand-out moment in a film filled with stand-out moments.
I also really enjoyed the moments that reference love. The ‘falling’ moment as the two adolescents cuddle was subtle and I only recognised it in the second viewing. The ‘break’ moment as the couple ended their relationship was brilliant captured too. The skill required as Directors to be able to paint a scene like that in a few short seconds is indeed admirable.
A final note must go to the audio. The soundtrack, created by Unseen perfectly fits the tone of the film. Furthermore the way they integrated sound into the piece, from the wind rustling through the trees through to the sounds of a lady in a retro film exclaiming she’s “fallen down and can’t…” is impressive. The ease at which they combined so many different elements and yet at no point as a viewer do you feel anything but relaxed, when it would be so easy to leave your viewer feeling jarred.
